Thrones Academy

It wasn't often that Raine showed his face openly in the common area. At least, not in the middle of the day. Especially not on a Saturday afternoon, when nobody was likely to be in classes, and the room was more than likely to have quite a few people in it.

But the fact was, he was hungry. And even if he didn't see anything resembling a warm welcome in the common area in his near future, being able to pinpoint when he'd have an opportunity to eat again in the future didn't change the fact that he was hungry now.

Maybe if he just... kind of kept his head down, he could slip in, grab some cereal or something, and slip out again before anyone started whispering too loudly.

The trick, he was learning all too quickly, was to just avoid eye contact and to not listen too closely to the people around him.

This wasn't his garden, and Raine knew it. It was hers. Sorrow's. But sometimes he borrowed it too, when there was a gap in his consciousness, when the shivers and whispers and suggestions in the back of his mind told him that he could have it to himself, and the whispers were rarely wrong, these days.

There hadn't been any whispers tonight, though. He'd just desperately needed fresh air, couldn't barricade himself in his room all the time and couldn't keep his head up at the dinner table and was so, so damn tired of smiling all the time while other people flung their jeers and barbs at him.

His name wasn't Jasper, but it was starting to feel as though that was all that he was allowed to be, anymore.

And so he sat in the gardens, his book in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and he looked up at the sky as the clouds drifted in. It would rain soon, even though the forecast had called for cloudless skies and a warm night. That on its own was almost enough to make him smile, just a little, as the first small drops of water soaked into his hair, ran down his face, and splattered onto the pages of the only book that he ever bothered to pick up, these days.

All it took was a stone to make liars out of the most experienced of the career fortune tellers. But then, most people didn't bother listening to the weatherman in the first place, did they?